ChatGPT for Healthcare: How Intelligent Chatbots Can Transform Medicine

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT became an instant hit and the fastest consumer app to reach 100 million monthly active users. The conversational chatbot owes its success not only to its ability to generate detailed, human-like responses to seemingly any question. Its flexibility is just as important. Since its release, people have been using it for everything from writing blog articles, social media posts, and even poetry to coding and planning holidays. The possibilities seem endless, and businesses of all industries want to take advantage.

Healthcare is no different. From assisting doctors to expediting clinical back-office workflows, there’s no lack of potential applications for ChatGPT in healthcare. This article will investigate the most promising ones and the challenges providers must consider when implementing ChatGPT for healthcare.

To best understand the potential of ChatGPT in healthcare, it’s essential to make one thing clear: ChatGPT is not an automation solution. Rather than handling workflows independently, ChatGPT requires human input—prompts—to generate the requested output. That makes it a perfect tool for retrieving, processing, and creating text-based content.

However, automation and ChatGPT share a common general goal: boosting productivity. The benefits of ChatGPT for healthcare are similar, too. Providers and physicians can use it to reduce paperwork and become more available to patients. In addition, the model can help prevent medical billing errors and enhance patient communication with some supervision. All in all, ChatGPT can save time and money while improving patient outcomes.

Medical specialists can use ChatGPT and automation together for an even better effect. That’s why leading RPA companies like UiPath or Automation Anywhere are working on integrating OpenAI’s chatbot with their platforms.

With that said, how exactly can you use ChatGPT in healthcare?

ChatGPT’s learning abilities are a crucial ingredient of its success. In healthcare, these abilities can be used to train the model with medical data. With that knowledge, ChatGPT can make data-based suggestions regarding diagnosis, treatment, and drug interactions or give insights for specific cases. By working together with AI, physicians can make more informed decisions faster.

Patients can use ChatGPT-based systems to identify and understand their health issues. Then, based on symptoms, ChatGPT suggests the following steps: further medical assistance, preventive measures, home remedies, or non-prescription drugs. With this guidance and all available information about their condition, patients can make better decisions, leading to more positive outcomes.

Similarly, ChatGPT can help patients keep track of their medicines. This could be particularly helpful for those who need to take several medications each day. For example, the model could provide detailed information about each medication, such as proper dosage and storage, as well as potential side effects or interactions with other meds. Then, if a drug is unavailable or the patient is intolerant to it, ChatGPT can suggest an alternative.

AI medication trackers could also be beneficial for physicians. For example, they could use it as an additional source of information about new medicines, defective drugs, and recalls or to quickly look up specific drugs.

ChatGPT for healthcare isn’t limited to the physician’s office. A good example is medical coding. When performed manually, it’s a slow and repetitive process that requires precision. Any error can lead to claim denials or compliance violations.

Medical coders can use ChatGPT’s language processing capabilities to generate the most appropriate codes for specific symptoms and patient history. With that, providers will avoid costly medical coding mistakes and process large volumes of patient data in a shorter time.

According to Becker’s Hospital Review, physicians devote almost 2 hours daily on average to EHR-related processes. However, in the same study, 57% of doctors declared that administrative burdens reduce time spent with patients.

Many back-office tasks in healthcare involve writing, and ChatGPT is just the tool for that job. For example, the model can assi